Quotes About Selfishness

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.

the closing words of my first book, 'We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

But the very fact that Darwinism is true makes it even more important for us to fight against the naturally selfish and exploitative tendencies of nature.We can do it.Probably no other species of animal or plant can. We can do it because our brains (admittedly given to us by natural selection for reasons pf short-term Darwinian gain) are big enough to see into the future and plot long-term consequences.

The welfare state is perhaps the greatest altruistic system the animal kingdom has ever known. But any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it. Individual humans who have more children than they are capable of rearing are probably too ignorant in most cases to be accused of conscious malevolent exploitation. Powerful institutions and leaders who deliberately encourage them to do so seem to me less free from suspicion.

Our genes may instruct us to be selfish, but we are not necessarily compelled to obey them all our lives. It may just be more difficult to learn altruism than it would be if we were genetically programmed to be altruistic. Among animals, man is uniquely dominated by culture, by influences learned and handed down.

An apparently altruistic act is one that looks, superficially, as if it must tend to make the altruist more likely (however slightly) to die, and the recipient more likely to survive. It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise. Once again, I do not mean that the underlying motives are secretly selfish, but that the real effects of the act on survival prospects are the reverse of what we originally thought.

Often altruism within a group goes with selfishness between groups. This is a basis of trade unionism.

The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness.

Unless otherwise stated, 'altruistic behaviour' and 'selfish behaviour' will mean behaviour directed by one animal body toward another.

Genes manipulate the world and shape it to assist their replication.

The gene is the basic unit of selfishness.

These are claims that could have been made for Lorenz's On Aggression, Ardrey's The Social Contract, and Eibl-Eibesfeldt's Love and Hate. The trouble with these books is that their authors got it totally and utterly wrong. They got it wrong because they misunderstood how evolution works. They made the erroneous assumption that the important thing in evolution is the good of the species (or the group) rather than the good of the individual (or the gene).

Even while the group is going slowly and inexorably downhill, selfish individuals prosper in the short term at the expense of altruists.

People prefer to get what they want rather than what they deserve.

She'd been imagining for the last fifteen or more years that if you disappeared, if you abandoned a wife and child, you did so for a better life: more happiness, more sex, more money, more of whatever was missing from your previous life.

Una vez dijo que para ser feliz había que cumplir tres requisitos previos –ser estúpido, ser egoísta y gozar de buena saludy que él no estaba seguro de cumplir más que el segundo. De modo que discutí, peleé, pero él quería creer que la felicidad es imposible; esta creencia le proporcionaba cierto extraño consuelo.

He said that there were three preconditions for happiness — stupidity, selfishness and good health

I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one's action has to be benefiting others. Morality does not have to be defined in relation to others … People like me want to … satisfy our hearts to the full, and in doing so we automatically have the most valuable moral codes. Of course there are people and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me.

Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don't want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego, their identity.

Deeds that seemed unimportant at the time would prove to have been momentous; a tiny act of selfishness and unkindness or, conversely, an unconsidered act of generosity would become the measure of a human life

Think about it. For the sake of fame, men will risk great dangers. They put themselves in the jaws of death more than for their children. For fame, they will spend their money like water and work their fingers to the bone. Have you not observed this in your own home?

In my experience,...the humans who talk most loudly about freedom are the ones who think it's so good that nobody else should have any of it.

Real evil wasn't about bending the law to suit justice: evil was acting out of small, intensely personal expedience and losing sight of the bigger picture so often that you never got it back again.

around for your entire adult life, then set it the fuck down, because it doesn't belong to you. It belongs to him.